Category Archive for: Python

RFP ROBOT: Website Request for Proposal Generator

The time has come for a new website (or website redesign), which means you need to write a website request for proposal or web RFP. A Google search produces a few examples, but they vary wildly and don’t seem to speak really to your goals for developing or redesigning a new website. You need to write a website RFP that will clearly articulate your needs and generate responses from the best website designers and developers out there. But how?

Have no fear, RFP Robot is here. He will walk you through a step-by-step process to help you work through the details of your project and create a PDF formatted website design RFP that will provide the information vendors need to write an accurate bid. RFP Robot will tell you what info you should include, point out pitfalls, and give examples.

I recently came across an article by Rory Cellan-Jones about a new technology from Jigsaw, a development group at Google focused on making people safer online through technology. At the time they’d just released the first alpha version of what they call The Perspective API. It’s a machine learning tool that is designed to rate a string of text (i.e. a comment) and provide you with a Toxicity Score, a number representing how toxic the text is. The system learns by seeing how thousands of online conversations have been moderated and then scores new comments by assessing how “toxic” they are and whether similar language had led other people to leave conversations. What it’s doing is trying to improve the quality of debate and make sure people aren’t put off from joining in. As the project is still in its infancy it doesn’t do much more than that. Still, we…

We recently had a client come to us with a request for a simple serverless API. They wanted little to no administrative overhead, so we went with the AWS Lambda service. It was my first foray with Lambda, and getting it set up came with its fair share of headaches. If you’re starting down the same path and want to build a simple API with Lambda, here’s a tutorial to help. Github If you would rather go through the tutorial on github, you can find it here AWS Lambda This is a great service offered by AWS that allows users to run a serverless application or function. It’s a cloud-based, serverless architecture that comes with continuous scaling out of the box. Deploy your code, and AWS does the rest. It will only run when “triggered,” either by another AWS service, or an HTTP call. It’s relatively young and has room…

Stop me if you’ve heard these before when people get to talking about programming languages…“These features are copied this from <superior language>.”“Nothing new here. <superior language> has done this for years.”“This language has nothing on <superior language>, but nobody realizes it.”“<superior language> does the same thing, but better.”I bring it up because I’ve been reading and writing a lot about Kotlin lately. And invariably someone posts a snarky comment like one those above, carrying with it a clear innuendo: my preferred programming language is better than yours.And every time I see those I leave with the same reaction. Who gives a shit?Now I’m not talking about people who are having constructive conversations or even just poking fun. Hell, I may have been known to take a jab at Java every once in a while. 👊I’m talking about a subset of programmers who treat languages like it’s a zero sum game — that for one language to succeed, another (or all…

Last month Chris Coyier wrote a post investigating the question, “When Does a Project Need React?” In other words, when do the benefits of using React (acting as a stand-in for data-driven web frameworks in general), rather than server-side templates and jQuery, outweigh the added complexity of setting up the requisite tooling, build process, dependencies, etc.? A week later, Sacha Greif wrote a counterpoint post arguing why you should always use such a framework for every type of web project. His points included future-proofing, simplified workflow from project to project (a single architecture; no need to keep up with multiple types of project structures), and improved user experience because of client-side re-rendering, even when the content doesn’t change very often. In this pair of posts, I delve into a middle ground: writing reactive-style UI’s in plain old JavaScript – no frameworks, no preprocessors. Article Series: Pure Functional Style (You are…

We’re looking for two new people to join our Ops team and help deliver the most reliable and performant Basecamp sites and services. You’ll work on every single piece of our infrastructure, both colocated and in the cloud. You’ll touch every single one of our applications, and you’ll frequently support other teams at Basecamp too. You’ll be joining our existing operations team with Blake, Eron, John, Matthew, Nathan (and me!). (That means joining our on call rotation too, whee!) We’re a super close team and we have a lot of fun together. We promise to learn from you and help you develop and mature new and existing personal and professional skills.Currently our company works from 32 different cities, spread across 6 countries. You can work from anywhere in the world, so long as your working day overlaps the beginning or end of the day in the U.S. That means 8–10am…

The words you use to represent yourself matter — and those words mean nothing.The only time “full stack” means something. 😍The vagueness and confusion around the phrase “full stack developer” has been lingering for years. Google it and you’ll find plenty of discussion about why it’s such a loaded term.Given that long-standing vagueness, labelling yourself as “full stack” might be doing you more harm than good, especially if you’re just starting out.🥞 Are you being honest?“Full stack” basically implies that you can do it all — that you can build front to back effectively and ship.But can you really do all of that well?Anyone with some programming experience can learn the basics of something new and cobble a solution together. But that certainly doesn’t make it good software — a goal every good, experienced programmer strives for.When someone with a few years experience labels themselves as a “full stack developer”, I’m pretty skeptical. Is there really enough experience there to be good at…

You might have heard of RxJS, or ReactiveX, or reactive programming, or even just functional programming before. These are terms that are becoming more and more prominent when talking about the latest-and-greatest front-end technologies. And if you’re anything like me, you were completely bewildered when you first tried learning about it. According to ReactiveX.io: ReactiveX is a library for composing asynchronous and event-based programs by using observable sequences. That’s a lot to digest in a single sentence. In this article, we’re going to take a different approach to learning about RxJS (the JavaScript implementation of ReactiveX) and Observables, by creating reactive animations. Understanding Observables An array is a collection of elements, such as [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. You get all the elements immediately, and you can do things like map, filter and map them. This allows you to transform the collection of elements any way you’d like. Now suppose…

Pixeldust’s challenge was to build an elegant and scalable site giving Mattress Pro an equal presence to Sealy and other large mattress manufacturers. Pixeldust designed a brand-new identity and sleek interface that incorporated Flash and a content management system. The overall result proved to be a huge success: the website played a big role in Mattress Pro’s successful merger negotiations with Mattress Firm.

Pixeldust worked with The nFusion Group to create an animated hero piece for their client Toshiba. Pixeldust employed Flash technology and a little imagination to bring the piece to life. Pixeldust has also built numerous rich media based banner ads for Toshiba’s many interactive campaigns.